


Birthday Games

by Luna (lunasky)



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Comment Fic, Gen, friendship fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-11-18
Updated: 2007-11-18
Packaged: 2017-10-14 18:55:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/152387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunasky/pseuds/Luna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It all started as a simple game of oneupmanship with birthday presents.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Birthday Games

**Author's Note:**

> Comment-fic I wrote for icarusancalion's birthday.

“Happy Birthday, Sir,” Lorne said, dropping a fifty pound, wet, still flopping, orangutan-resembling sea urchin onto his desk.

John jumped away from the twelve inch spikes that covered its body. “What the hell?”

Lorne didn’t even have the good graces to look chagrined. “You told me to find out who was pilfering the wool socks from supply. I did.”

“You’re telling me, this thing swam in from the ocean just so it could eat our socks?” John stared at it in disbelief. Even after living in the Pegasus Galaxy for three years he found that story hard to believe. One of the spikes from the sea urchin’s quivering body impaled a sticky note that had been sitting on the pile of papers he still had to go through. Ironically enough, it was a sticky note Elizabeth had put there with his admin password so he could include all those reports in the next data burst back to Earth. The reports were six weeks late and judging by the odd fluid coming out of the urchin; his reports weren’t getting filed anytime soon.

“Nope. That’s the unauthorized goat Dr. Peterson is keeping as a pet. Turns out it has a liking for standard issue socks.”

John stared at Lorne and then stared back at his desk. The sea urchin had dissolved the sticky note and was eating the yellow mush it had turned into. John also had the distinct impression it was eyeing the reports the sticky note had been attached too. “Major, you have two seconds to start explaining things. After that, you’re retyping all those reports.”

Lorne cleared his throat. “That’s fine sir, I always keep a copy of them on my hard drive. As for the socks, sir, it turns out the goat isn’t house trained and has been using the transporter room on A-3.”

With a quick mental check, John realized that, thankfully, hadn’t had to use the transporter in that section in the last few months.

Lorne carried on. “It gets better. Through a series of weird events that I won’t get into right now, Dr. Brown found out that the brown stuff she’d been stepping in every day to get to the botany labs was exactly the thing that her new plant required in order to flower. So for the last three weeks, she’s been collecting the feces from the transporter room and mixing them in the soil.”

The sea urchin-orangutan finished dissolving and eating John’s urgent reports and started moving towards his stack of unfinished mission reports. “This lends a whole new slant to ‘The dog ate my homework.’ So what does this have to do with goat manure?”

“Dr Brown’s now flowering plant exhaled pollen which was picked up by the air-return system which was eventually eaten by the dust mites living in the filtration system. Since dust mites only have a life span of twenty days, eventually they were expelled into the exhaust system, and into the ocean where they made an excellent snack for Junior here.”

John scrunched up his face in disgust as the urchin left a trail of slime on his desk as it searched out more paper products to devour. Maybe he had to concede this victory to Lorne. This was definitely worse than the toe-sucking toothbrush they discovered in one of the abandoned labs and he’d given Lorne for his birthday four months back. Which left him only eight months, Earth time, to figure out a present for Lorne that would beat this.

Lorne seemed to know what he was thinking because his smirk got even wider. “I just thought you’d appreciate hearing this story, sir. It’s definitely one you can tell the grandkids.”

John snorted. “I’ll keep that in mind as it’s not likely to happen any time soon.”

Lorne shook his head. “Oh, did I forget to mention that? The goat, the flowers and the dust mites actually preserve some of the DNA from the dead skin cells found in used socks that have been disappearing from private quarters as well. The sea-urchin actually incorporates some of the DNA, so Junior here, is actually 0.03% John Sheppard. I checked the DNA results myself.”

John stared at the sea urchin-orangutan as Lorne slapped him playfully on the back. “Happy Birthday and congratulations, Sir. Try to beat that.”


End file.
